Ada, Countess of Lovelace, is known to history as Byron’s daughter, the mathematical genius credited with writing the world’s first prototype computer program.

Charles Babbage was a Victorian intellectual enthusiast, a Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and inventor, who proposed the first working computer, which he called the difference engine.

Few know the daring duo were also dauntless crime fighters who pooled their quirky personalities and formidable brains to keep the streets of 19th-century London free of miscreants, ne’er-do-wells and, er, street musicians.

Why do so few people know of the thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage?

Sadly, because they never happened.

The real Lovelace, who battled what appears to have been bipolar disorder much of her life, died of cancer at 36. Babbage never built his computers, and died at 79 a disappointed man.

With a sensibility that owes more to Blackadder than Batman, the story takes place in an alternate “pocket” universe, in which Lovelace and Babbage successfully build and program their mighty difference engine and harness its awesome powers to thwart an eclectic variety of Victorian villains.

Padua’s webcomic isn’t just a comic you read on a computer screen. She exploits the medium to construct a multi-layered, interactive narrative which allows readers to link out to witty, meticulously researched footnotes, which offer digressions on everything from Victorian fashion to the 19th-century banking system — which often link out themselves to original source documents. It’s like a giddy treasure hunt through the past, with Padua as your chatty, knowledgeable guide.

Padua began the webcomic three years ago as a one-off joke to promote Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women in science. (This year, Lovelace Day falls on Oct. 16.) But Lovelace and Babbage — filled with jokes about everything from Star Trek, to the Brontë sisters, to the Duke of the Wellington’s horse, to The Wizard of Oz — became an accidental online sensation. It earned raves from Wired and The Economist, and won a global following among tech geeks, history enthusiasts and poetry lovers.

Padua has just struck her first book deal with Pantheon, the prestigious house that published such landmark graphic novels as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

In a genre better known for X-Men and Avengers, a comic about real-life mad scientists might seem perplexing. But Padua insists Ada Lovelace makes a perfect heroine.

“Hers is really a classic young mutant story. She has all these powers and she’s full of angst. There’s something so over-the-top about her story that suits a comic really well.”

Like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Lovelace and Babbage live in Victorian London — though much earlier in the Victorian era. But they don’t have a Holmes and Watson-style relationship. They’re equally matched in intelligence. While Padua’s Babbage is like a genius toddler, full of wild enthusiasms and generally lacking in social couth, Lovelace is darker and more brooding, with a far more sophisticated social intelligence. While the cartoon universe is fictional, Babbage really did invent everything from the cowcatcher to the survey form, and he really did crusade against street musicians. And Lovelace really did use mathematics to fight her Byronic poetic temperament, and she really was Babbage’s interpreter to the larger world.

“I think Lovelace and Babbage were really lucky to have found each other,” says Padua. “They were a couple of egomaniacal intellectuals who overanalyzed everything. The two of them were so great and interesting. It’s such a crazy story, you really don’t have to make things up.”

Padua, 40, lives in London with her husband, a BBC journalist. But her Edmonton roots run deep. Her maternal grandfather was Clifford E. Lee, CCF politician, pharmacist, businessman and a founder of NuWest Development Corp., one of the biggest housing development companies in North America. The socialist multimillionaire gave most of his fortune to charity, leaving such legacies as the Clifford E. Lee Nature Sanctuary, the Citadel Theatre’s Lee Pavilion and a range of arts scholarships. Her mother, Judy Padua, was an outspoken Edmonton social activist who headed the progressive Clifford E. Lee Foundation.

Melina Sydney Padua — she draws under her middle name — never bought a comic as a kid, though she stole her brother’s New Mutants and Mad magazines. Her teen tastes tended to Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson. She graduated from Ross Sheppard High School and the University of Alberta, then studied animation at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont.

“I was a giant math geek … I wanted to be an engineer when I was in high school. But then you get into all this gender weirdness. You think, ‘Can I be an engineer if I’m a girl?’ ”

Instead, she studied theatre — but fell in love with animation while working as an assistant animator on the classic National Film Board short, Cactus Swing.

“I was never comfortable with acting. I’m a very typical animator personality. I tend to hide behind a desk,” she confesses.

Her timing was perfect. She graduated just after Disney scored huge hits with The Lion King and Toy Story. Hollywood was scouring animation schools for talent.

“I had literally 60 job offers the day I graduated from college. It was really nutty. I went to L.A. the instant I graduated and was working on a feature film, not as an assistant, but as an animator.”

The film was Warner Brothers’ hugely successful Iron Giant. Later, Padua turned from conventional cartoons to computer generated animation, working on Clash of the Titans, The Golden Compass, John Carter, and the second and third Narnia movies, where she helped to bring to life the fearless talking mouse, Reepicheep. In 2004, she made her own computer-animated short, Agricultural Report, about a nervous, news-savvy cow. It earned awards at film festivals in Ireland, Italy, France, Austria and Brazil.

Still, computer animation is largely anonymous — and it takes 40 hours of painstaking work to produce five seconds of footage. And Padua missed drawing, too. So when a friend asked for help to promote Lovelace Day, she dashed off the first eight-page Lovelace and Babbage tale over the course of two evenings.

“I just whacked it out, without any expectations, and put it up on my blog.”

When she glanced back, the comic had already had 20,000 hits.

Since then, it has become a viral sensation. It’s free, though Padua also markets an iPad app, and Lovelace and Babbage T-shirts. The webcomic became so successful, Pantheon actually sought her out and surprised her with an unsolicited book offer.

Lovelace and Babbage is often classified as steampunk — which makes sense, given that many steampunk books and movies are alternate histories, set in universes in which Babbage built and perfected his computer, and thereby changed the 19th-century world. But Padua doesn’t share the typical ornate late Victorian steampunk esthetic.

“Steampunk has a romanticism to it, and I’m not a romantic myself. I really love the early Victorian period, the 1830s and ’40s, when things were a bit more rough and gritty around the edges, and the British weren’t so sure of themselves as the centre of the world, when they felt they had to still fight for it.”

Padua insists the first mention of Lovelace and Babbage as crime fighters was just a joke. But when readers — including her husband — demanded crime actually be fought, she created some unconventional villains to foil, from evil organists to vampire poets. For her, part of the creative excitement is interacting with readers, and watching the story evolve, in serial instalments, with their input.

“To get that kind of instant feedback? It’s like improvisation,” she says. “It’s hard to do this alone. You sort of need someone with you.”

In high school, she invited friends to hang out in her basement. Now, she does the same, on her website.

“I’ve been able to create my own basement, and populate it with my own special set of nerds. It means I can make my jokes more obscure. In Hollywood, you can’t do any joke that won’t be understood by 90 per cent of the market. The web lets you be a little more geeky.”

Certainly, the webcomic reflects Padua’s own eclectic interests in everything from engineering, to 19th-century literature, to English social history. It draws on her experience in theatre, too, with the stories unfolding like little plays, with lots of dialogue and snappy banter. But Lovelace and Babbage isn’t exclusive or exclusionary. Padua (quite literally) paints her extraordinary hero and heroine with such charm and brio, it’s hard not to fall in love.

Padua’s next challenge is to take the improvised, interactive, intertextual esthetic of the webcomic and transfer in to old-fashioned paper as a graphic novel.

“The web has been my first draft. It’s going to have to be rewritten, I think. I’m going to take the original story and make it much more beautiful.

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